Community Engagement

Photo of Anne H. Charity Hudley and her sister Renee Charity Price presenting inMarch 2008 at the African-American Woman’s Language Conference at the University of Texas-San Antonio

My local affiliations drew me to my position at William and Mary and they are the driving force behind my most basic interests as an academic. I am a native of Henrico County, Virginia and the William and Mary Professorship in Community Studies allows me to continue work in my home community and to share my commitment with William and Mary students using a need driven and vested model of engagement that I hope will serve both our students and community for years to come.

In the fall of 2007, I taught a Sharpe Scholars First Year Seminar entitled Language Variation and African American Vernacular English. Students in the course worked with the Academy for Life and Learning, a school for long term suspended and expelled middle and high school students from Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools and the Big Brother Big Sister Program in Williamsburg. Jeree Harris, one of the teaching fellows for the course received the 2008 tradition of service award and first year student Samanthe Tiver received the Freshman Service Star award. Students Jeree Harris, Joe Hayes, Katie Ikeler, Andrew Squires, and I describe the course in an article entitled Service Learning as an Introduction to Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Equality that appeared in the 2008 inaugural edition on pedagogy in the journal American Speech.

I have established lasting community partnerships with teachers and administrators at St. Catherine’s School and the Orchard House School, two independent middle schools in Richmond, Virginia. I have worked with my sister Renée Charity Price, chair of the history department at St. Catherine’s, on ways to foster African-American girls’ participation in classroom discussion.

With Nancy Davies, the founder and head of Orchard House School, I co-authored the school’s diversity mission statement and I am now working with teachers and parents to discover ways to best implement diversity practices at the school.

I am Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics, the William and Mary Professor of Community Studies, and affiliate of the Africana and Women's Studies Programs at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. My book, co-authored with Christine Mallinson, is entitled Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools and is forthcoming from Teachers College Press.